BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1321 



progress and its pecuniary returns. Hence progress on these lines 

 continues; so that its comparative slowness, complained of by its 

 advocates and leaders, is more from social and mental inertia than 

 from economic opposition. 



Next after the Sanitarian school has appeared that of the Eugen- 

 ists. Their criticism also recognises defects in the industrial age; but 

 especially scrutinises its long boasted increase in population. For it 

 finds this "progress" not simply falling short of evolutionary ideals, 

 but even too much below the normal level, and this whether bio- 

 logically or psychologically considered. These propositions are 

 founded on observation, and verified by statistics; and these viewed 

 as an incipient qualitative census; this much more thorough-going 

 than the too simply quantitative census, with its optimistic tradition. 

 The results of eugenic surveys have been very far from optimistic, 

 indeed alarming; those who know them best at times even say 

 appalling. These are sadly confirmed by the official returns of 

 governments — especially in times of war, and both for this country 

 and America, since war demands a qualitative selection of young 

 men suitable for bearing arms. Hence the national shock, nearly a 

 generation ago, from the enlistment returns from the Transvaal 

 War; and recently to America, from the amazingly low results of 

 its more thorough testing of 2,000,000 volunteers, though them- 

 selves a so far selected group. 



The eugenist has thus justified his case; and he goes on doing so, 

 ever more thoroughly. He shows that our peoples, apparently so 

 advanced and ad\ancing — so far as quantity of wealth and popula- 

 tion are concerned, and in various forms of culture too — show also 

 no little of going backwards, in the fundamental qualities of breed- 

 values. And, more alarming still, he shows that the rate of reproduc- 

 tion of the mediocre types of population — and even of those more 

 or less sub-normal, alike in organic, in mental, and in social values 

 — is now, under present social conditions, proceeding much more 

 rapidly than that of the more normal; while these again increasingly 

 tend to outnumber the super-normal in any or all of these three 

 above-noted values, bodily, mental, and social. If then it be also a 

 statistical fact — and no one has contradicted it — that 25 per cent, 

 of the existing generation are producing 50 per cent of the next, 

 the increase of inferior family breeds, and the reduction of superior 

 ones, is surely ominous for the social future, and that before long. 

 Man is thus certainly "not demonstrating that he can remain per- 

 manently civilised". Even the maintenance of the social heritage, 

 let alone the furtherance of its best activities, cannot but increasingly 

 require a better selected minority for direction and guidance, and 

 also a higher standard of life-efficiency throughout the community as 

 well. In short, the eugenist here breaks with conventional doctrines 

 as that "all men are created equal"; since he sees they arise, develop, 



